Princeton team presentation at iGEM 2006

The Princeton team was the second runner-up for the Grand Prize of iGEM 2006! From their team wiki: Team Princeton chose to create mammalian biobricks for iGEM2006. The novel mammalian biobricks are used as components of systems designed by the iGEM2006 team as previously described. We focused on using these system components to differentiate mouse embryonic stem cells (and other mammalian cells) into tissues of our choosing. We have maintained the general concept of the modularity of the bacterial biobrick, although our choice to work with mammalian cells has necessitated the use of a unique design and construction method using lentiviruses. Lentiviral infection is much more efficient than transfection and the gene (or genes) of interest is stably integrated into the cellular genome. We have created a first version of a mammalian biobrick as shown below. Unique restriction sites surround the gene and the promoter allowing the user to quickly swap out these components. We are currently working on unique sites to modularize the reporter as well. Lentiviral biobricks are different from bacterial biobricks in that size limitations of the virus allow us to place only one promoter + gene + reporter combination in each viral particle. More than one promoter + gene + reporter cassette can be delievered to a given cell by coinfecting with multiple lentiviruses. Circuits are routinely comprised of multiple genes, promoters and reporters as discussed in our systems above. Coinfection of multiple engineered viruses allows us to easily place a full circuit inside one mammalian cell.

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Google Video | November 5, 2006

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